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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Chalking out the classroom blues
By Mariz TadrosExamination time has never been a festive period for Egyptian families. The script is always the same. Parents feverishly supervise their children, unwittingly adding to the stress; private tutors come in and out; and coffee brews around the clock to keep all parties awake into the wee hours of the night, for as long as the pressure is on. It is not any different this year. Why, then, are parents, children and teachers all complaining that examination time is worse this year than usual?
Many students feel the examination schedule was specifically conceived with one aim in mind: torture. Some examinations start in the middle of the afternoon and finish at 5-6.00pm. The complaint is that the later during the day an examination is held, the more difficult it is for them to maintain concentration. The heat is another nerve-racking factor. If you happen to have the misfortune of being a school student in Aswan, sitting for an examination at 2.00pm, when the sun is sizzling hot, is unlikely to bring out the best you have to offer.
This is the first year that so many examinations are being held in the afternoon. It is also the first year that examinations, including those of the secondary school certificate, are all being held within the space of one month, from 27 May to 26 June. Previously, examinations were spaced out within a longer period of time. Ragab Sharabi, first under-secretary at the Ministry of Education, told Al-Ahram Weekly that compressing examinations to take place within a limited number of days has many advantages: students have a longer time to study, there are fewer opportunities for private tutors to exploit examination time to make more money and it costs the ministry less money on exam supervision.
Parents and students are flabbergasted that examinations for the primary and preparatory stages started after university examinations. It only seemed logical that pupils in primary schools would finish the school year ahead of university students. "School students are finishing later than before because, for the first time, we decided to have a longer school year. Instead of 34 weeks, we have 39 weeks now," Sharabi said. He added that the school years in developed countries are longer than in Egypt. A long school year should give students a better chance to make the most out of education "and they may benefit from the school facilities such as the multimedia systems now installed in computers in most schools."
Students, on the other hand, retort that the longer year has not yielded additional benefits from school facilities. They point out that some schools are wanting in computer facilities to begin with. What it did result in was more time spent at home studying. Once a syllabus is finished, students spend the rest of the time studying at home or taking private lessons, instead of going to school. Many teachers stop teaching classes shortly after syllabi are covered.
Hamed Ammar, the education guru, admits that a large part of the time before the end of the school year is spent at home rather than at school. He accuses both parents and students of trying to spend the shortest time possible in school. "Parents spoil their children, and expect them to get an education without working hard to deserve it. In China, the school year is four weeks longer than ours, even after we prolonged it to make it 39 weeks. To acquire proficiency in a certain set of skills, students need to be at school, but parents think syllabi can be crammed into a short period of time. Education takes time. It is like preparing a meal that is supposed to take half an hour in 10 minutes; the results won't be the same," he argued.
However, many parents share the conviction that for the school year in Egypt to be as long as it is abroad, the same quality and opportunities have to be offered which, they insist, is not the case. They see the process itself, without its prolongation, as torturous for the students, in terms of syllabus content as well as the quality of teaching.
The supervisors of examination rooms are also feeling the heat this year. One supervisor in Giza governorate, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that this year the examination schedule was particularly bad. "The minister wants all examinations to go on at the same time, but are we equipped for that?" she wondered. "A typical day," she explained, "would start at 9.30 in the morning, and we have to supervise the examinations for third preparatory until 1.30pm. This is followed by supervision over the first and second preparatory examinations from 2.00pm until 6.00pm, and then we start marking the papers from 7.00pm until 11.00pm. What kind of a day is this? Many of us don't get home before midnight, and we start all over again the next day."
She added that the ministry has instructed them to be very scrupulous and meticulous in marking the examination papers, but she wonders whether this is humanly possible by the end of the day, when supervisors are completely burnt out.
"They are putting far too much pressure on everybody unnecessarily," she sighed.
But the disappointment of parents and students with the examinations and the long scholastic year are not the only problems facing the Ministry of Education. Four examinations for students in the preparatory stage were cancelled in the middle of the week in Alexandria, when it was discovered that the examination questions had been leaked to the pupils. In Port Said, 13 teachers are facing charges of leaking examination questions to secondary stage students. More teachers in the governorate of Daqahliya are under investigation for allowing pupils to cheat in the examination rooms.
